If everyone sold this way, I'd have no hesitation in downloads like I buy DVDs and CDs.

I hate this DRM crap.. can't buy from Amazon and play on iPad, can't buy from Apple and play anywhere but Apple hardware. I don't want to re-buy all my content every time I upgrade my gadgets. At least DVD DRM is super easy to remove and CDs don't come with DRM, allowing me to do whatever the hell I want with stuff I've already paid for.

1) 20 years of text messaging should have already accomplished what he thinks Twitter is about to. Not going to happen. The garbage that generates ridiculous amounts of revenue for phone companies has just (partially) shifted to Twitter. All that garbage was always present.

2) 25% of tweets contain links. I don't know what percentage of traffic this site generates through twitter links, but for many tech focused sites, Twitter is a major source of page views. So, actually, Twitter is being used by many people to connect with the same sort of "big ideas" which use lots of "words" that he thinks are dying out.

He is scared of Twitter for some reason and using any ridiculous argument to justify his personal prejudice.

if you weren't joking, then obviously you don't have an MBA, or any common sense. Recouped on first sale? Every piece of furniture sold incurs "real" physical material costs, which you can't create for free... unlike virtual goods (movies, music etc.) that cost close to nothing to replicate after the initial development costs and can be packaged in virtually limitless ways.

To bring up the hated "my mom" argument up again. I don;t think my mom is too dumb to use a "REAL" computer. What's too complicated for her is keeping up with security updates, anti-virus updates and just any software update in general. She doesn't understand defrgamenting the hard drive, crashing drivers or re-installing software.

However, she's isn't dumb enough to pay extravagant prices for the same things she can get elsewhere for much less... or free. She can use the iPad Safari browser and the millions of free apps with free content, without having to worry about security issues, pop up ads that want you to install "add ons" or other assorted junk on the internet. A closed platform is plenty helpful there.

So a closed platform is good business for Apple, which sells the hardware but if the media companies think they can make a bundle on selling content, they had better think again. Making money in the iPhone market remains as difficult as ever (except for Apple, of course) and it's not going to magically change with the iPad.

Now's the time for Palm to push WebOS as strongly as possible. Just getting a hammering on the stock market is meaningless, they were getting hammered before WebOS was released too. I love the Pre, Palm has added significant performance improvements with every OS update and a new one is expected with the release of the Pixi.

- We're up to 320 apps in the store. There's hundreds more homebrew apps. (http://www.precentral.net/how-to-install-homebrew-apps)
- There is already a dedicated developer and hacker community that is releasing patches to add useful features. (http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Main_Page) They even came up with an on-screen keyboard!
- Palm hired a key engineer from AMD/ATI recently. (http://www.precentral.net/palm-grabs-amds-linux-graphics-engineer-puts-him-work-webos) Thankfully, they seem to be serious about pushing the performance envelope.
- Palm's share of the mobile browser market is already at 5% and growing every month (http://www.precentral.net/admob-report-shows-palm-web-use-more-20)

Give up on the WebOS? No. Diverting the company's attention away from what is their most promising platform in a decade is not the way to go. Wall Street be damned (for a while, anyway).

I expect better from you Mike, than making a broad judgement based on a superficial look at WebOS. Not up to the standard of research of this blog :)

If they had asked for permission to play a prank explicitly, it wouldn't be a prank anymore. So basically, for the whole pathetic idea to work, they had to somehow get her consent without her knowing about it. Uninformed consent was by design.

I've heard cases where the mere presence of encryption software like TrueCrypt and Bitlocker was considered grounds for a search, since you wouldn't encrypt anything you didn't want to hide, would you?

Any idea as to how many travelers actually carried laptops / electronics? Comparing that number (rather than a blanket 144 million number) to the number of searches might make this look very different....

B) should would include computer operating systems too, since they can play music. So that would mean any open source OS would basically have to pay up or be considered illegal. What fun for the music inductry.